In the opening chapter of Ethica Thomistica, Ralph McInerny presents Aquinas’s view that human actions are moral actions. What this means is that human acts that are conscious, deliberate, and voluntary are the proper objects of moral evaluation. Humans are not responsible – or rather less responsible – for acts lacking these qualities.
As with Aristotle, Aquinas holds ‘that every action is undertaken with a view to some end and that the end has the character of the good’ (McInerny, page 2). Aquinas further says that good means ‘perfective or fulfilling of the agent’ (McInerny, page 2). Moral appraisal of the human act considers both the worthiness of the end and the appropriateness of the means.
Central to Aquinas’s framework is the distinction between genuine goods, which contribute to our genuine perfection as human beings, and apparent goods, which are mistakenly pursued as fulfilling but do not. Bad actions are mistakes in this sense: they do not aim at evil as such, but arise through defects in practical reason, disordered desire, or failures of judgement.
McInerny distinguishes internal or technical appraisals (e.g. a teacher’s pedagogical effectiveness) from broader or comprehensive moral appraisals. The latter evaluate how actions contribute to the agent’s overall flourishing and the common good. This leads McInerny to make a useful distinction between moral¹ (any human act insofar as it is open to moral appraisal) and moral² (morally good action properly speaking). While all human actions are necessarily moral¹, moral² actions are a matter of free choice.
McInerny therefore stresses that no human action escapes this broader moral appraisal. Technical competence (‘Is this a good report? Did I contribute appropriately to the meeting?’) is necessary but insufficient. The fuller question is whether our actions, taken as a whole, contribute to our real perfection as human beings and to the common good of the communities we belong to.
Applied to university work, this moral lens shifts attention from performance and effectiveness to whether institutional practices support genuinely human goods.
- Personal flourishing: Does the work develop virtues such as justice, prudence, diligence, and courage? Does it leave space for family, rest, relationships, and intellectual life, or does it erode character and health?
- Common good: Are we contributing to an institution that genuinely serves truth, education, and human development, or are we propping up something dysfunctional, bureaucratic, or misaligned with the university’s proper ends? Are our specific actions (teaching, administration, treatment of colleagues) just and charitable?
What happens when in asking these questions of ourselves and our place of work, we find the answers are for the most part – and perhaps increasingly so – negative? On a classical understanding of the university, institutions exist for the pursuit and transmission of truth and for the formation of minds and character. If administrative demands, metrics, politics, or culture increasingly force actions that undermine this telos (e.g. excessive bureaucracy, lowering standards, or treating education as a commodity), many ‘technical’ workplace actions may fail the moral² test. In such cases, we may begin to question whether our work, taken as a whole, can be integrated into a well-ordered and flourishing life – and, if not, what practical conclusions follow. And given the place work occupies in our lives, we may in turn begin to question whether our lives as a whole are properly ordered towards the good.
(Ambrogio Lorenzetti: Allegory of Good Government)
